Saturday, 17 July 2010

The broken statues stranded upon the shoreThin-lip'd pouting ancestors who don't recognize their offspringAny more. They've been knocked off their blocksToppled to the ground, buried, fractured in various places,Replanted facing away from the sacred ground.

They speak inwardly to themselves of matters and concernsThat have been of no particular moment to anyoneAt any time within memory.

Their words are bare murmursScattered on the sea wind, lostFragments of unknown languages,Whispers, half-audible subvocalisms,Bits of sound as brokenAs they are. The only audience isA passing rack of cloud.

..............................Does the slowExtinguishing of old stars --The night sky's wreath unwoven threadBy thread -- happen like this?One by one they go out,A dying-off of desire, as the mindWishes only for an end to distanceIn the light. The light which will be hard and cold

And flowing into rock, as water into stoneBy the shore, with no one hereTo know this, or to sayThese giant shapes ever shadowed out the linesOf figures with names, to an unconcerned eye,Into the silence of an island beyond Odysseus' sail.

There is thinking and there is an end to thinking that is beyond thinking, that little space before the thinking starts up again.

For one moment I feel the moai have been made happy.

(For a long time people didn't know they had bodies, because the bodies were buried under the ground. And it seems there were also periods when, if you were pissed off at the guys on the other part of the island, you went and pushed their moai over. So the moai have actually endured quite a lot. Just lately some joker chipped a piece off one of their ears. So much for tourism.)

(And it is still a great mystery how they were moved over large stretches of hilly ground and set into place. Sometimes, as Keats suggested, bless his heart, there is a greater pleasure in the NOT knowing.)

perhaps this is just a universal yearning to find out about our true ancestors...

once i fell in love with these and tried to find out about them...

many of them have some hats too... this fact plus some other signs lead some researchers to this theory that they have been some people from east... coming to this island... and always waiting for their people to come and find them perhaps...

this poem transcends this subject and talks about something deeper... more human... really loved it!

Though of course we lack the cultural understanding based in experience, we do sense something palpable of other worlds in the realm of the moai.

It appears that through the production and ceremonial attendance upon these massive statues of deified ancestors the people sustained a symbiotic relationship with the dead. The dead provided for the material necessities of the living, and the living, through offerings, armed the dead against the terrors of the spirit world. Human settlements were situated on the coast, and moai were erected all along the coastline, set up so as to gaze inland, watching over their descendants in the known world of the settlements the lay before them, with their backs turned upon the unknown, the spirit world in the sea.

Beautiful pictures from which to write this, "Mute" but also not (since we're reading it here, maybe even out loud), "The only audience . . . A passing rack of cloud" (so it so often seems). . . .

On another note, we were reading Tintin yesterday, Flight 714, whose adventure leads to inside a volcano on the island of Pulau-pulau Bompa (somewhere btw. Djakarta and Sidney) with a stone statue that looks quite like those here -- perhaps Herge had been looking at pictures of Easter Island?

The weird statues in the cave beneath the volcano in the story sound generic, though as it's apparent they have been put there by the extraterrestrials, and as the logistical mystery of the moai has never been solved, perhaps it's "safe to assume" (!!) that the same or similar forces are/were at work in both cases.

I've been fortunate enough to have been to Rapa Nui (it was called Easter Island only because the first Europeans (Dutch) to see the place did so on Easter Sunday, killed some indigenous people, and sailed on)...The Moai had no "hats" (though it's a common misperception) - the red rock on top of the statues (quarried from a different place) indicated the HAIR, which was worn in a topknot fashion....It is generally agreed by the people of the island (and by Alfred Metraux, the excellent scholar whose book, EASTER ISLAND, published in 1917, remains an invaluable text, how the Moai were moved. Every last tree was felled to roll the Moai into position via a system of pulleys....The people worked for centuries to carve (and move) the Moai from stone until they were all toppled in the "civil" wars....I've published essays on Rapa Nui, (including a tribute to the great Thor Heyerdahl and his much disdained-in-academia (of course) work on migration theory) in FIRE (edited Jeremy Hilton, Oxfordshire, UK) and in Len Fulton's now defunct "Small Press Review" (California) and a chapbook in-part about my time there was published by Allen Fisher as Spanner #41(2004) titled THE MANA OF THE MOAI, should anyone reading this be seriously interested....Neruda's wonderful late-life sequence of poems of Rapa Nui translated as THE SEPARATE ROSE (by William O'Daly) was published by Copper Canyon.

That's as good an account as any I've heard, and as a carless geezer with foot problems (two dislocated metatarsals), I can easily identify. One walks just so far and then simply wants, as the expression goes, to take a load off one's feet. And in the case of the moai, that load would have been formidable.

Aliki,

Thanks very much for coming, and yes, you must be a sensitive reader, as you have detected the presence of a bit of sentiment in this, and a bit of thinking -- in short, the poetry. Your sensitivity to that is surely a good sign, whatever your age